"In This Concrete Jungle, A Woman Has to Do Her Best": Gendered Wealth Building Challenges in Postcolonial Jamaican Music

Jamaica’s internationally renowned music industry has a longstanding history of male domination. Male reggae artists like Bob Marley, Jimmy Cliff, and Burning Spear led a political music revolution during the genre’s golden era in the 1970s and early 1980s. Despite their massive influence musically campaigning for Black freedom, these male acts’ music and business efforts failed to equally support and encourage female artists’ growth and development to the same degree. Female artists like Rita Marley, Marcia Griffiths, and Judy Mowatt have been instrumental in their own right, but are often remembered for their time as background singers, the I-Threes, or in relationship to men in the industry. Throughout the decades immediately following Jamaica’s independence, female artists recorded and produced influential records but faced severe challenges in the business of music. Artists like Norma Fraser, Susan Cadogan, and Sheila Hylton were frequently underpaid for their musical contributions. As detailed through oral histories, their stardom and earnings were thwarted as male producers and music executives frequently, and surreptitiously, wrote female artists out of the rights and royalties of their music. Despite amassing local and international acclaim in the U.S. and U.K., their wealth-earning potential was curtailed significantly. Through this common gendered experience, I highlight Jamaican women’s challenges in music as reflective of systemic barriers to Black women’s development in the postcolonial Caribbean. Furthermore, I also connect their epistemological experiences to Black women’s music and political experiences in the global north to chart Black women’s prevailing issues in business opposite their popularity and musical success.